Book Club: A Tender Age

In her post introducing June’s Book Club selection, “House of Prayer No. 2,” by Mark Richard, Macy cites a passage that includes this sentence:

Sometimes in the orange and grey dust when the world is empty, the child lies in the cold backyard grass and watches the thousand starlings swarm Dr. Jim’s chimneys, and the child feels like he is dying in an empty world.

I remembered this instantly for the line that came after it, the kicker that made me close the book on my thumbs and gather myself:

The child is five years old.

The age checks that occur throughout “House of Prayer No. 2,” especially in the earliest sections, are necessary; the child, as Richard calls himself before switching to the most effective use of the second-person since “Bright Lights, Big City,” is extraordinary, and though he’s labeled defective because of his deformed hips, we know better:

One night the special child pulls down a book off the doctor’s shelf and begins to slowly read aloud from it. The party stops. It is a college book about chemicals. In two more months the child will start first grade.

And:

On Sunday mornings you all take turns hosting the Gospel Show. One Sunday a month you get up at five in the morning, ride your bike over to the cemetery, make sure the three red lights are burning on the antennae so you can check off the maintenance log. … Then you ride through the sleeping town and open the station. You have to let the tube equipment warm up for a half hour and check the pile of Teletype that has been layering up all night. … You’re live, you’re on the air, you’re thirteen, good morning.

The device works because it reminds us that time is against the child, who is indeed special; a doctor has told Richard that he’ll be in a wheelchair by the time he’s thirty, and we’re aware of the passing years and all the action—working on a scallop boat in the Outer Banks, editing a military newspaper, chasing Tom Waits on Esquire’s dime—that he’s trying to cram in before that happens. Eventually—and unsurprisingly, given the book’s title and the lengths to which Richard goes to show the distance between his young self and God (“Since your grandmother has told your mother that she is going to hell, you will not be driving thirteen hundred miles that summer to Louisiana over unfinished interstate in the back of an un-air-conditioned car. You are twelve years old”)—he receives a calling to a more spiritual life. But like another great memoirist, Mary Karr, Richard has enough doubt, self-deprecation, and talent to prevent this development from becoming mawkish:

You do not offer platitudes to people in their times of need. You have learned that the only platitude you can offer others in a time of need is to tell them that you love them. You also do not offer prayers in the hopes of changing things. You have come to believe that those types of prayers are dangerous, especially when the word “if” is used. Those types of prayers are a type of negotiation, and you are beginning to believe that negotiation with God is sinful.

We aren’t told Richard’s age here, though we know he has had both hips replaced, is married with sons, and is a successful writer. We don’t need to know. His thirtieth birthday has long since passed.